Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Toward a more civil debate universe

There’s a whole bunch of interesting discussion that went on for a while on the NDCA listserver. I guess you could boil the main focus down to decorum/civility, although other issues were raised. What is acceptable, in other words, and what isn’t, in the world of high school debate? A reach for a code of behavior seemed to be the goal. I can’t speak to this very directly, as I’m not in that many actual rounds anymore, and the ones I’m in are PF, and I get the impression that the real problem area is policy. Still, as I was walking past a room with a round going on recently, I could hear violent argumentation bursting beyond the closed door, aggressive, threatening stuff full of vulgarity. The glass window in the door revealed that not one person in the room was dressed in a manner that could even remotely be described as dress casual, much less business attire. And there is little doubt in my mind that none of this, for one second, would be tolerated by the administrations of either the host or participating schools. No wonder coaches are worried.

On the other hand, of course, the coaches are entirely to blame. I mean, who is making the rules here? Who is running the tournaments? Who is sending their kids into these rounds? While we have an age old issue of how much students ought to participate in controlling the nature of their education, that issue is only about hearing and responding to the students’ voices and concerns that may otherwise elude the actual educators, rather than suggesting that we hand over the control of education from the educators to the people being educated. We do, of course, have good and bad teachers and good and bad educational systems, but this is not to question that educational programs ought to come from professional educators. I’m not going to argue this, because the opposing side would be defending the elimination of education as a profession. Let’s not get ridiculous.

Questions to coaches:
1. Do your students look like they are hanging around on street corners or do they look like they’re going to be representing their schools in competition? The old styles and traditions of debate are actually there for a reason (neutral, professional attire supports a specific level of presentation), and the idea that some people are more comfortable dressed some other way does not make that other way preferable. This is not a question of money, because you don’t need a tailored suit to look neutral and professional, but you might want to go a little beyond a backwards baseball cap, a t-shirt and jeans. That dressing in this way reflects the students’ diversity is an argument that I doubt is being made for the same students on the track team or for the school drama. For that matter, it’s not limited to minority students. It’s the general fashion of policy, it has been for quite a while, and it’s not a positive thing.
2. Do your students use vulgar language in the rounds? That’s an easy one. Vulgar language may be one’s everyday mode of communication, and this has nothing to do with money, race or class, because some of the most foul-mouthed people I know are among the richest and/or smartest. But it is no great stretch of oneself to know when certain language is or isn’t appropriate. If we can’t teach our students that, we’re not doing a very good job, because I assure you, the future for students who can’t speak intelligently without resorting to vulgarity is a limited one.
3. Are you happy with what your students are running in their rounds? If not, then are they really your students, or are you just there for the doughnuts?

My thoughts on all of this aren’t particularly new to members of the VCA. One of the reasons I eliminated policy at Bump was that an army of people who looked like hooligans were coming to my school and acting like hooligans: theft, malicious damage, aggressive flouting of simple tournament rules. Just because you put on a jacket and tie doesn’t make you a saint, of course, but the argument Gladwell makes in The Tipping Point is relevant. Neighborhoods that look like criminal areas allow people to act like criminals; clean up the areas, and people start cleaning up themselves. The externals are very much connected to the internals, and not only do the latter determine the former, but the former can also determine the latter.

I guess you could argue some of this stuff, complaining that I’m old-fashioned or whatever, but then I’ll ask another question. If you’re bothered by aspects of the activities that you’re doing, and you’re aware that other activities in the broad tent of forensics don’t have these bothersome aspects, why don’t you just switch out of the bothersome area? I mean, I stopped liking LD when I stopped being able to follow it. I have nothing against it per se, but I had always liked LD because it was, with a little work, accessible, even to casual parent judges. When it lost its accessibility, I moved to PF precisely because that activity is accessible. What I’m seeing is people getting progressively more frustrated with where policy is going, even though if you ask me it’s their own fault, and now they’re wondering how to change it. Well, they probably can’t, or they would have already since, as I say, they’re the coaches, and they’re the ones responsible from the very beginning.

There also seems to be some great belief that these are issues that must be discussed only among coaches, and maybe not even all of them. What? You think students are acting like hooligans and you’re afraid that the students will find out? Puh-leeze! Open discussions are the core of what we do, and of course that doesn’t mean that everyone can participate, especially in a disruptive way, and sure, you might want to limit the conversation to the coaches, but to limit it so that the students can’t even hear it? Feh.

There’s also some belief that MJP (or as many people refer to it, MPJ) is the culprit here. Well, that’s hard for me to buy, because every screed against the practice seems to be oblivious to the fact that you’re usually talking about maybe 50 or so judges split 5 or 6 ways, where the math and the limitations are constricting, and all their arguments seem to assume infinite number of judges with perfect mathematical distinctions. I’ve been making arguments about how competition works on the NDCA blog (and next up I’ll talk about MJP), and the whole point of competition is, well, to be competitive. Tournaments need to recognize that, for those few hours, the competition comes first. MJP, done correctly, while flawed, is probably the best way to manage judge assignments competitively. Let’s look at and fix the flaws, but let’s not disparage it out of ignorance while spending all week making book on your own prefs and “gaming the system” and pulling all sorts of shenanigans to work around what you think are the inherent problems. And by the way, if you’re such a great believer in random judging, please don’t come storming into tab every time one of your teams doesn’t get one of its 1s.

So, yeah, I’m a little unhappy about this in general. If people really wanted to fix these problems, they’d set a dress code for their team and, if they run a tournament, for their tournament, they’d ban profanity in rounds, and they’d read and edit case materials in advance to insure that they’re academically acceptable at the secondary school level. They’d manage the judges they bring to tournaments to exclude people who don’t agree to the coach’s rules. And they’d call to account the coaches who don’t follow these practices. Would this cause harm to students who wish to promote change in the areas of race, class, gender, etc.? I don’t think so. Real change isn’t going to come from bullying your way to a debate round win. Maybe that’s what the coaches should be teaching their students: Real change is real hard, and real important. Pretend change is a sham that shortchanges the real thing.

Coaches, teachers: Do your job!

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